Jewish American Literature

Jewish American literature has chronicled and paralleled the Jewish American experience.
It depicts the struggles of immigrant life, the stable yet alienated middle-class existence that followed, and finally the unique challenges of cultural acceptance: assimilation and the reawakening of tradition.

There are many works of literature that depict the life of the Jewish immigrant. The heroes of these works tend to be young men or boys who are trying to establish financial viability in the New World while fighting with the demons of traditional Jewish life and family. Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) follows David from a Russian shtetl (village)--where an Easter pogrom took the life of his mother--to his ascension in America as a successful, yet emotionally devastated clothing manufacturer. Another classic work of immigrant literature, Henry Roth's Call it Sleep (1934), was one of only two books unanimously voted to the Yiddish Book Center's top 100 modern Jewish books. Call it Sleep uses Yiddish and butchered English to articulate the conflict between new and old cultures. It chronicles the disintegration of Jewish tradition and Jewish law. Anzia Yezierska, a Russian immigrant who worked in the New York sweatshops, was another important chronicler of immigrant life.

Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth are the masters of Jewish American fiction. Among them they received seven National Book Awards (including six in an 18-year period), three Pulitzer Prizes (one each), and a Nobel Prize (Bellow, 1976). Malamud, Bellow, and Roth wrote about Jews rooted in America, who nonetheless suffer from alienation. Like his predecessors, some of Malamud's main characters--like Morris Bober in The Assistant (1957)--are immigrants. However, Bober is not trying to make it in America. He has already failed. At mid-century, writers like Malamud began to analyze the problems with the American experiment.